Meta-heuristic algorithms in car engine design: a literature survey

Meta-heuristic algorithms are often inspired by natural phenomena, including the evolution of species in Darwinian natural selection theory, ant behaviors in biology, flock behaviors of some birds, and annealing in metallurgy. Due to their great potential in solving difficult optimization problems, meta-heuristic algorithms have found their way into automobile engine design. There are different optimization problems arising in different areas of car engine management including calibration, control system, fault diagnosis, and modeling. In this paper we review the state-of-the-art applications of different meta-heuristic algorithms in engine management systems. The review covers a wide range of research, including the application of meta-heuristic algorithms in engine calibration, optimizing engine control systems, engine fault diagnosis, and optimizing different parts of engines and modeling. The meta-heuristic algorithms reviewed in this paper include evolutionary algorithms, evolution strategy, evolutionary programming, genetic programming, differential evolution, estimation of distribution algorithm, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, memetic algorithms, and artificial immune system

Event-Based H∞ filter design for a class of nonlinear time-varying systems with fading channels and multiplicative noises

In this paper, a general event-triggered framework is developed to deal with the finite-horizon H∞ filtering problem for discrete time-varying systems with fading channels, randomly occurring nonlinearities and multiplicative noises. An event indicator variable is constructed and the corresponding event-triggered scheme is proposed. Such a scheme is based on the relative error with respect to the measurement signal in order to determine whether the measurement output should be transmitted to the filter or not. The fading channels are described by modified stochastic Rice fading models. Some uncorrelated random variables are introduced, respectively, to govern the phenomena of state-multiplicative noises, randomly occurring nonlinearities as well as fading measurements. The purpose of the addressed problem is to design a set of time-varying filter such that the influence from the exogenous disturbances onto the filtering errors is attenuated at the given level quantified by a H∞ norm in the mean-square sense. By utilizing stochastic analysis techniques, sufficient conditions are established to ensure that the dynamic system under consideration satisfies the H∞ filtering performance constraint, and then a recursive linear matrix inequality (RLMI) approach is employed to design the desired filter gains. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed filter design scheme

The failure tolerance of mechatronic software systems to random and targeted attacks

This paper describes a complex networks approach to study the failure tolerance of mechatronic software systems under various types of hardware and/or software failures. We produce synthetic system architectures based on evidence of modular and hierarchical modular product architectures and known motifs for the interconnection of physical components to software. The system architectures are then subject to various forms of attack. The attacks simulate failure of critical hardware or software. Four types of attack are investigated: degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality and random attack. Failure tolerance of the system is measured by a 'robustness coefficient', a topological 'size' metric of the connectedness of the attacked network. We find that the betweenness centrality attack results in the most significant reduction in the robustness coefficient, confirming betweenness centrality, rather than the number of connections (i.e. degree), as the most conservative metric of component importance. A counter-intuitive finding is that "designed" system architectures, including a bus, ring, and star architecture, are not significantly more failure-tolerant than interconnections with no prescribed architecture, that is, a random architecture. Our research provides a data-driven approach to engineer the architecture of mechatronic software systems for failure tolerance.Comment: Proceedings of the 2013 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE 2013 August 4-7, 2013, Portland, Oregon, USA (In Print